every minute
by saunatonttu
Summary: I cannot erase and I cannot rewind. Mikasa. Rated K .


**A/N: Uuuh, a first fic for Shingeki no Kyojin, and possibly the only one. This is sort of AU-ish.**

_tick tock_

_hear the clock countdown_

_**.**_

_**.**_

_**every minute **_

**.**

**.**

_I can't erase and I can't rewind. _

She exhaled and pulled the cigarette out from her mouth just as the first flakes of snow fell down from the skies, purer than any shade of white Mikasa had witnessed before.

(Maybe because, in her memories, white had always been tainted with red.)

She watched the trail of smoke rise up into the air, over the buildings, her eyes blank but her mind anything but so.

Her home – the two people she had called home in the aftermath of year 845 – had been killed two years ago on this date. A fact that she could not change, and which pressed at heart heart more than any difficulties in her current reality.

(Cruel, beautiful word.)

(Beautiful because it had shown her immense love and warmth.)

(Cruel because it took away that love.)

She sighed, returning the cigarette into her mouth, absently tugging at her red scarf. Her muscles ached, and standing up was difficult, but there she was – in the ruins of a village, smoking a cigarette she had snatched from one of the guys.

In a way, the suffocating taste of the cigarette made her head and heart feel lighter than neither had felt for the past two years – or maybe she had been this light all along, but she simply hadn't noticed as she had thrown herself deeper into attacking the Titans in _his_ place.

Snowflakes fell and some brushed Mikasa's chilled cheeks, melting into drops of water soon after, and Mikasa's lips remained in their permanent, thin line that had not changed at all.

She was a survivor, but she didn't feel like one. She had _failed _her promise to protect Eren, to keep him in this world, and while she had learned to keep walking, to keep moving on, there was that dark, nauseating part in her heart that knew that she had failed.

Mikasa's eyes dropped shut as she inhaled shakily; the most emotion she had shown in a while.

She coughed, once, twice, and then her breathing was back to normal, although ragged and exerted as every other movement of her body.

Another fight, another victory that Eren wasn't there to see. Another _massacre_ – it was all so _numbing_, and Mikasa wasn't entirely sure what it was that kept her going.

Eren was gone.

Armin was gone.

All of her families had been torn to shreds, and she was the sole survivor.

The dark grey smoke that wafted up the air served as a powerful reminder of the steam rising from Eren's Titan form, and if she tried hard enough, she could feel her hands on Eren's own form, on his shoulders, trying to tug his Eren out-

Misaka's brow furrowed at the memory, and she exhaled through her nose before dumping the cigarette in the rubble and ruins, and then stomped on the extinguished cancer stick.

She stared at the ground, her chest rising and falling as her dark, nearly black, turned white from the snowflakes. Her chest ached, so much, and she wished-

(_futile, futile wishes of better times_)

-her family to come back to her. Not her biological family, but Eren and Armin because they had been the trio that got through anything together, the trio bound together with something stickier than glue and harder than steel.

Mikasa shover her hands into her pockets and turned to leave another Titan's evaporating corpse behind, her mind fragile but her steps as stable as they ever were.

Her heart was made of something less than iron, and so it was clear that it could break into thousands of pieces, and there had been times when that had happened.

Mikasa pulled the scarf over her mouth, the warmth of the fabric soothing her as she briskly walked to where she knew Jean and others to be. Perhaps _they_ were her new family.

(And perhaps this one, too, shall perish, and maybe this time she will die with them instead of forcing herself to live.)

It didn't matter much, however; she had a reason to live, to continue on – for both Eren and Armin, for all their deceased parents that had desires for nothing more than them to reach adulthood and be as happy as possible with the choices available to them.

A cold breeze whistled by the narrow streets Mikasa wearily strolled down, a grim reminder that winter was coming, and she shook her head, white flakes falling from her ebony-like hair.

She was a fighter and a survivor, and she was not as alone as she thought she was.

"Oi, Mikasa!"

Jean served a wonderful reminder that she still had someone to come back to, _something_ to look forward to, even if it was not for herself.


End file.
